New Year’s Resolutions: 2012

I know, it’s not exactly an original topic for a blog post, but hey, I need to jot them down and by putting them here I feel as if I will need to stick to them more… or something.  Anyway, humour me, here they are, in no particular order:

1. Try to get the Dude into a routine.  This means getting his meal times a little more sorted out, as he’s a hungry boy but only when he’s not too tired, and also getting sleeps happening on more of a schedule, as I think he’ll respond better to that and I might actually get some peace. I’m getting closer to achieving this already, given that he now has 12 hours sleep a night (mostly) and a clear two sleeps per day, and I can roughly predict when they happen. Roughly.  I’d like to get him into going to bed earlier, as currently he goes down between 8 and 9 most nights, although saying ‘goes down’ implies that I put him to bed and he stays asleep for the night, which never happens.  He is slowly improving, but most nights I spend a good half hour to an hour settling him down the first time, then have to go in twice to resettle before we finally go to bed about 10:30 or 11.  My mum says I should just get over the fact that I can no longer be a ‘night person’ and go to bed early with him.  I’m still in denial.

2. Finish NaNoWriMo.  I’d like to finally do this, having attempted and failed for a number of years now.  I’m not sure what it will take.  Actually that’s not true, I know exactly what it will take: some discipline, daily targets, sticking to a routine.  Refer back to number 1.

3. Study.  I really want to do my Masters.  Probably Arts, probably creative writing or life writing.  I’m also thinking about finishing off the Grad Dip in Editing and Publishing I started a few years ago.  That way, I might actually be able to start working towards my dream job, editing books in a publishing house.  I realise that now I’ve left work to have the Dude, I have a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity to rearrange my career into something I actually want to do, instead of constantly being branded a ‘project management professional’ or being offered marketing jobs, which I’d frankly rather chop off an arm than consider.  The marketing and advertising machine and all who sail in her totally shit me.  Although I do like watching The Gruen Transfer.

4. Get a job.  Money is really tight.  I’m talking really tight.  Okay so it’s not to the point where we have to ration our food or stop eating meat or can’t ever have takeaway, true, but it’s not great.  And me not working is making it super hard.  It’s hard for me because I have this mortgage and all these bills to pay but no income.  Actually scratch that, I have Centrelink and their awesome $24 per week.  Strangely enough that doesn’t suffice.  So I need to start earning an income again and I really don’t want the Dude in care just yet as I don’t want him catching all sorts of colds and diseases from all the other vaccinated, non-breastfed, chemical-ridden kidlets, and I also don’t think it’d be good for him to be away from me for that long, so it’s going to have to be working from home.  Which is doable.  I just have to find the time.  Refer back to number 1.

5. Write more.  Yeah, this one always makes an appearance.  But it needs to be there because I do need to write more.  And by writing I mean working on actual stories that will one day be published, not blogging.  How I’ll ever find the time is beyond me, but I must have this one in the list just in case its presence helps make it happen.

6. Blog more.  I go through phases of being really good with blogging, but then I slack off or Christmas happens or I forget or the Dude has a hard few days or weeks or some other shit goes down and I forget I have a blog for a while.  I would like to blog at least once a week minimum, preferably more.  Again, no idea how I’ll find the time but I just have to.  I read all these blogs by all these other awesome mums and think, how do they do it?  But they don’t have the Dude.  Although The Feminist Breeder is one that I am pretty amazed by, her baby is currently not sleeping at all at night yet she still manages to blog and presumably do all her other stuff like work and study and be a mum to her other two kids and a wife to her husband.  But she might actually be an Amazon.  That’s what I think anyway.

7. Move house.  This isn’t much of an actual resolution, but I want to have it in there because it’s something big that will be happening next year and it represents something bigger for me.  I guess it represents a compromise, but at the same time it represents a new phase for us as a family because we’ll finally be in a new place, an actual house, and even though it’ll be in shitty Sydney it’s one step towards what I want.  A small step, but a step nonetheless.

8. Refinance the mortgage.  This has needed to happen for a while, pretty much ever since I let the fixed interest rate lapse and started paying way too much to a stupid finance company in WA who handle my mortgage from a bank in Adelaide for my house in Canberra.  Yeah, makes no sense.  I’m close to getting this sorted, although it means husband taking it on technically as he’s the breadwinner, but by marrying me he gets half the house anyway so I figure that’s fair enough.  Once I’ve done this, I’ll be paying so much less that the rent will more than cover it, so paying bills will be a little easier.

9. Discharge all debts.  This one is important, not just because I need to be debt free, but because I don’t want to end up with a terrible credit rating like my dad and be unable to ever get a loan.  I also hate the stress of bills and debts hanging over my head, and it’s particularly hard because what is hanging over my  head is automatically hanging over husband’s head and he doesn’t need all that.  He shouldn’t have to pay for my inability to manage my finances.  So I plan to get a little extra money when I refinance so I can pay off all the debts and consolidate.

10. Refurbish my house in Canberra.  I’ve needed to do this for a while, and just recently when the carport randomly collapsed I realised it needs to happen in the new year.  The house is nearly 40 years old, and although the kitchen and bathroom were re-done not long before I bought it in 2005, that was six years ago now, seven actually, so it’s definitely time to do something.  I shudder to think what it’ll cost to deal with the issue of the water leaking from the bathroom upstairs through the ceiling of the laundry below it, but that has to be tackled.  In addition there are a few other things like a pergola that I’d like done.  I need to speak to a real estate agent to gauge just what I need to do in order to improve the value without over capitalising.  As it stands, I have great equity in the place and excellent tenants, so I’ve done well.  But if I don’t do something soon it will all fall down!

11. Collect all my stuff from my shed in Canberra.  Back in mid 2007 when I went to London, I sold a lot of my stuff, but the stuff I didn’t sell or give away that I still wanted to keep; important stuff; stuff with sentimental value. I packed it all into my little shed in the front garden before I left and when I came back in January 2010 I peeked in.  It was all still there.  That’s as far as I got.  I haven’t been back.  When my tenant rang to say the carport had collapsed, I thought she meant the shed.  It’s not exactly the most stable building in the world, just a little tin shed someone bought from Bunnings.  I can’t believe it’s still standing.  And I wonder what state my stuff is in!  There’s so much important stuff in there, pictures and stories from my childhood, an Edwardian sideboard that was in my parents’ house which I always meant to refinish, some random art projects, all my artwork from my year at art school, probably even books that are no doubt damp, mouldy or eaten by insects… There’s so much stuff I can’t even remember half of it.  At some level I’m looking forward to going through it all, the process of rediscovery, but the thought of seeing just how much it’s been destroyed and then trying to work out what to do with it and how to get it where I want it is not appealing at all.  No doubt I’ll update about that at some point…

So that’s it.  Bloody long list!  Only I could write 1500 words on my new year’s resolutions…

Hindsight and commitment

One of the first things I did when I began my UK adventure four and a half years ago was take a nine day tour of the Scottish highlands. I’d been in the country about two weeks when I flew up to Edinburgh and, on the recommendation of a good friend, took a tour with a small but awesome company. The brilliant thing about the tours this company ran was that they were limited to small groups – maximum 15.

Image via Wikipedia

I knew no one, and I hated Edinburgh. But early one morning I ventured onto a Mercedes bus with an eclectic group of fellow tourists. There were two groups in two buses; the other group had been assigned a guide/bus driver who was a goody goody version of Ewan McGregor. Damn. I noticed a questionable looking individual in a kilt loitering nearby with a cigarette. He looked like he’d just come from fighting a battle against Vikings. When he stormed onto our bus, I realised he was our guide and driver for the next nine days! “Everyone like loud music?” he shouted over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. No one answered, probably terrified. “Well if you don’t you can fuck off!” and with that he put his foot down and we experienced his maniacal driving for the first time. I loved it. The bagpipe rock he had blaring, speeding past massive dawdling campervans on single lane roads as Kilt Man yelled “fucking Germans!” out the window. Others were confronted, amused, intimidated, scared, offended, unimpressed. Ewan McGregor told us later that he had a bit of a reputation with the ladies. At first I was too mesmerised by Ewan’s green eyes to understand why any woman would be attracted to that dark, hairy, swearing, chain smoking, argumentative storm cloud of a man, but soon I began to see the attraction. And he really looked great in a kilt. Although his penchant for flashing anyone nearby at any given moment was a little unnerving.

Pretty sure this was somewhere near Glen Coe...

I ended up having a little ‘thing’ with a very cute Spanish boy who was eight years younger than me. Kilt Man was six years older; I was never interested in older men. At one point, I said to my friend, “it’s going to be first come, first served,” and I meant it, although I’d decided if Kilt Man made a move, I’d have him. But he didn’t. And I shagged the Spaniard. Which lasted about eight minutes.

I’d always assumed Kilt Man was never keen on me. He was so confident, and I felt like such an amateur. Although I was surprised Spaniard was interested. But saying that, Elaine from Seinfeld had a point: “It’s like trash collection. As a woman you just have to put your trash out on the street and eventually the next trash man will collect it.” Something along those lines anyway.

I never saw Spaniard again after I went back to London, even though I came back to Edinburgh three weeks later for the Fringe. Kilt Man made friends with me on Facebook (or rather I friend requested him I think) and we had a few conversations here and there but nothing much over the last four years or so.

Then he sent me a message. He’d been chatting to one of the other girls from our tour and apparently my name had come up. He ended the message with a ‘X’. Which doesn’t mean anything. You know, some people call everyone ‘babe’, or sign off text messages with ‘xx’. It’s how some people roll. Like husband, for example, is very anti ‘xo’, but he’s a big fan of the smiley face. I tend to work out what others do and then go along with that, so if they do kisses at the end of an email, I might too.

It was great to have a little fun banter going back and forth with messages. I wondered, had he been keen on me? So I asked him, in a roundabout way. Turns out he had been but it would have been inappropriate of him to make a move, given he was our tour guide. I was chuffed. I looked over at husband and thought, I’m lucky, I managed to get a guy who is just as attractive (for many of the same reasons). I may have missed a chance for some fun with a hot Scotsman, but I’ve got a hot husband who can also do an awesome Scottish accent.

I thought we’d leave it at that, laugh about not having managed to hook up and that’s it. But it seems he didn’t have that idea. And he began to ask what I’d have done if we HAD hooked up back then! I’m only too familiar with this sort of thing, having done my fair share of Internet dating and suggestive chatting with prospective lovers… If I were single, it’d be different, fantasies up the yin yang! But I’m married. And my husband and our relationship are everything to me. So when kilt man said something just that bit too leading and suggestive, I had to bring him back to reality. My reality. I had been playing along and I do like the guy, so I didn’t just say, hey, I’m married, that’s not on. But effectively that’s what it amounted to. I basically left him to his fantasy. I prefer my reality.

The Melbourne dream is rippling and shifting

Like in the Matrix when things begin to bend and twist impossibly, my Melbourne dream is a little shaky all of a sudden. I’m not sure what I want.

It happened when I agreed to head down to Melbourne for the first time since the Dude was born. At first I suggested that going for a holiday would be like teasing me, showing me yet again how great life in Melbs could be and then making me come back to horrible old Sydney. But I realised I wanted to catch up with all my friends and so I plucked up the courage and went.

I stayed Thursday night with a friend who I used to live with in London, then Friday and Saturday with another friend I used to live with in Canberra, then back to my London friend’s place on Sunday night and home Monday. It was great being there, the cooler, dryer climate feels much more me, and it was so great to see friends again. Even the public transport feels so much less stressed and more organised than Sydney.

But something began to twist out of place as the days went on. Something was off. It wasn’t just because I had the Dude with me and he is a handful at the best of times, neither was it any change in me or my mind. But without me having any part in it, something shifted. I felt an odd harsh reality, like I’d idealised Melbourne somewhat. And I really missed husband, I think in his role as partner and as father. I guess a number of little things niggled at me: my ex-London friend’s house was quite cold and a little noisy; and my ex-Canberra friend is so enjoying her freedom with her boyfriend and no kids or real responsibilities.  I don’t fit in there as well as I thought I did.  Or, to be more precise, home isn’t just a physical place.  I knew this before, but sometimes it takes an experience to really get it.

The first house I stayed in is quite lovely, although not something I’d buy or live in. The aspect is terrible so it doesn’t warm up, and the layout is a bit weird. In addition, the train track is over the back fence. It really is a nice place, though, renovated so well by my friend and her husband, but just not me. But I guess you sacrifice space and noise for a prime south east position. I had a great catch up with my friend, let’s call her Robyn, even though I’m not sure I like the area too much, despite being walking distance to Carlisle St and Chapel St, funky little shops and cafes. I find it a little too exposed and in the thick of it, but I know that’s why my friend loves it, she wants to be where the action is and would probably go stir crazy in the suburbs. She has a baby six weeks younger than the Dude and a very different parenting style and philosophy from me, however that doesn’t stop us enjoying hanging out and discussing parenting, swapping ideas and hopes and fears.

The other friend I stayed with, let’s call her Spanish Queen (though she’s neither Spanish nor regal), lives in the north eastern suburbs. It seems more secluded there, slightly further out of the city but still close enough to anything you’d need. Her place, again, while beautiful and perfect for her and her partner, is not somewhere I’d live. It’s a little small, no real yard, and can get quite cold. I’m a big fan of the old passive solar. The bed was ridiculously comfy though and the Dude was clearly more comfy as he slept past 11am! We had a quiet night Friday then on Saturday night SQ invited a few of our other mutual friends round and we had a lovely meal at home with plenty of catching up. I had to take the Dude off to bed about 10 so I said goodnight and SQ said she was going to meet up with her partner (let’s call him King Henry) out somewhere but vowed “I won’t be late”. I didn’t mind either way as we were off to bed. About 1:30am I heard them come home, and stumble into bed. Then at 2:30am I woke to a loud knocking and banging on the front door. SQ’s house is a bit of a fortress so I knew if they’d locked themselves out there was no way they’d get in. I couldn’t understand why they’d come home and gone back out again but I got up to let them in. It was SQ alone, absolutely smashed, looking totally confused about why I was at the door. She’d taken a taxi home but somehow had no money to pay for it! She tottered in like someone with early onset Parkinson’s, and rummaged in her wallet which was lying on the counter, only to find no money. Her scarf and bag and keys were strewn around the kitchen. “Just pay with a card,” I said, but she was adamant that wasn’t to happen. The huge burley African cab driver was getting impatient standing in her driveway. I heard her trying to wake KH: “There’s a man at the front door and he’s really angry, he wants money!” I heard her implore, only to be met with disinterested groans; there was no way KH was going to be roused from his drunken slumber. Out tottered SQ again, getting a bit more flustered. She glanced around the kitchen and spied a bottle of Shiraz someone had brought for dinner. Grabbing it off the bench and waving it above her head she called to the now furious taxi driver, “will you take a bottle of wine?” He politely refused. It was at that point, with her apologising to both me and the driver while rummaging through a jar of change that I went back to bed. I lay there thinking, what the hell am I doing here? I want to go home.  Now with the Dude I feel really weird when people are drunk or rowdy around him, like it’s fundamentally wrong and I just want to be elsewhere, take him away.

Of course when I relayed the story back to the two hangover victims (neither had any recollection), it was hilarious and didn’t seem too big a deal but at the time I didn’t want any part of it.  I kind of felt momentarily angry at my friend for being so drunk and crazy at her age, with all her responsibilities, but it was really silly of me to react that way.  The fact is, she’s got no kids, and that’s how she likes it.  Anyway, the rest of the trip was quite lovely, going for long walks and having some catch ups with various friends.  I realised though that even though one of my friends, SQ’s sister, is pregnant now and people are settling down, at some level I don’t necessarily just fit in with all of them and their lives.  They are still very different in terms of their values and beliefs and the way they are living their lives.  I think before I was somehow a bit blinded by this idealised view of a Melbourne life and was thinking of it in terms of hanging out with those people all the time, when really it’s not what it seems.  I was a bit disappointed by SQ’s sister actually, as she was generally disinterested in talking about her pregnancy and anything relating to it, and at one point declared she didn’t want ‘unsolicited advice’.  Another post coming on that subject.  Suffice it to say, they are very different from me, and I can’t allow my rose coloured glasses to give me false impressions of what life there might be like for us.  I have to think about me and my family and what works best for us as a unit as well as individuals.

When I came home, I was very glad to be here, despite the fact that it is Sydney!  And oddly enough, Sydney put on some cold weather upon arrival, just for me!  There’s still a lot more thinking to be done about our final move, and while I still hate Sydney and don’t want to settle here, Melbourne may not necessarily be the home of choice.

NaNo: the idea

So November is here and despite only having written 535 words, I’ve actually begun NaNoWriMo for the fourth year running. And for the first time with a very full on baby taking up all my time!

But I’m pretty pleased with myself because, unlike the other years, I’ve got myself a very clear novel idea! I actually know what I’m writing for once!

Wanna know what it is? I feel a bit odd divulging my plan on such a public forum, but who am I kidding, no one reads my blog anyway so I may as well indulge in some crapping on about my idea.

This one has been in the pipeline for a couple of years now. It’s nothing that spectacular when I describe it but I think it could be freaking awesome. The story is about London and the rite of passage for most antipodeans that is going there to work and live and get perspective. Or whatever reason seems feasible. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist.  I think I’ve actually written about some stuff on this blog, stuff that actually happened, but my NaNo novel is a fictionalised account.  I’ve got ideas for about half a dozen key characters and some storylines, but I’m not sure how they all fit together yet.  Because it’s NaNo, I’m just going to write whatever and see what emerges – no time for editing!

Inspiring book spines and high standards

Replicated from my SheWrites blog, 19 January 2011.

Apart from the records my dad played on Saturday afternoons, one vivid and early memory that sticks with me is the background ‘wallpaper’ of my parents’ bookshelves.  I remember when learning to read, browsing the spines of the books, noticing the colours, their thickness, which ones stood out and which ones I suddenly noticed for the first time. I was particularly intrigued by a book I assumed was some sort of thriller or mystery (judging by the need to use only the author’s surname on the cover) about a prehistoric dinosaur type creature with perhaps metaphysical or psychological overtones: Roget’s Thesaurus (The Saurus – get it?)

To this day, some 25 years later, I can picture the book spines: Colin Wilson – a thick magenta book with green block writing; Xavier Herbert – Poor Fellow, My Country; Franz Kafka – Metamorphosis; Thomas Mann – Death in Venice (I think?); Germaine Greer – The Female Eunuch; Alex Haley – Roots; James Joyce – Ulysses… the list goes on.  I rarely pulled the books out of their shelves, as the spines alone were enough, their colours and designs, fonts and styles either pleasing to my eye or putting me off, and their titles often like tongue-twisters for my young brain (The Aquarian Conspiracy was one – I used to repeat this over and over in my head).  Strangely enough, of those books I’ve named, I only ever read one, and that was the Kafka.  But I feel like the influence of all this prolific writing somehow seeped into me over time, and I wish I could go back and look over those shelves again, but sadly they will never be what they once were as my parents divorced when I was nine and the books were broken up into piles, moved about, lost, thrown away, left in boxes in garages…

I know that my writing is stalled by my lack of motivation and my inability to complete a story.  But I think there is also still this element of not putting it out there.  So I always mean to enter competitions or submit articles or stories for publication, even in free ezines or obscure sites, but I never manage it.  The one time when I did successfully write and publish pieces online was when a very creative and motivated film phd student friend pushed me to do it.  In fact she gave me little choice in the matter.  The deadline was set – and the faster I wrote, the more I’d be published.  I ended up writing, I think, six film reviews in the space of about a week, and it was the most fantastic experience.  Not only did I get to review some amazing documentaries for the LIDF, but I even got to meet some of the directors of the films in person who actually praised me formy reviews!  Can you imagine!  They were grateful for what I’d written and felt happy I’d understood what they were trying to achieve.  I was bowled over.  I knew I didn’t necessarily belong in the ‘film world’, but I lapped up the praise.  My friend who got me into it in the first place kept remarking how amazed she was at the quality of the writing and how quickly I churned out the reviews, given I’d never reviewed a film in my life.  I certainly was on a roll at the time, just pumping out chunks of writing, refining as I went.  I did watch the films and do most of the writing while I was meant to be working though…

This all leads me to believe that there is something about doing ‘unimportant’ writing that is easier.  I didn’t worry about how these reviews reflected on me – I was just interested in providing something of quality for the benefit of the directors and for the audience to read before they saw the films.  It was external to me.  So perhaps that’s where the motivation is, in writing with an external focus.

Pregnancy and nesting

So I’m now 27 weeks along and feeling just fine. It’s certainly been an interesting ride so far.  Baby’s head is sitting firmly in my pelvis (not a pleasant feeling on the bladder) and feet and hands are moving almost constantly. Which is good, it’s what’s meant to be happening apparently. Despite being overweight, I’m healthy, blood pressure is normal, baby’s heart rate is normal and I feel good.  Being pregnant hasn’t been hard yet, but I suspect as I venture into this third trimester I’ll start to feel a bit heavy.

I’m having the baby at home, not in a hospital, which has been my wish from before I even wanted to be pregnant (or had someone to get me pregnant!) and I’m really excited about it all. At first I was a bit apprehensive about giving birth in our loungeroom, as we live in a tiny one bedroom flat under a big mansion, so it’s not like I can dedicate a room as the birthing room, and baby won’t have his or her own room (not that it’s needed anyway early on). We’d talked about moving out to somewhere with two bedrooms before baby arrived, and I thought this was the plan until a couple of months ago my husband mentioned casually how he’d been telling people I was having the baby in our lounge in our current flat.  I was surprised to hear this!  Turns out he’d worked it all out in his own head but had forgotten to mention it to me.  He said he thought it made sense – we live in one of the best suburbs in Sydney, right up on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  It’s so beautiful that tourists come here from everywhere just to walk around across the road from our house, and it’s the perfect place – calm, natural, quiet, awe-inspiring – to bring a baby into the world and for him or her to spend the first few months of life.  He commented yesterday that the lounge is such a peaceful room, not too bright but not too dark, large enough to fit a big pool in, wooden floors to help deal with any, erm, spills, and just a generally serene place, perfect for the arrival of our first baby.  I soon realised that he was right and that we didn’t need to move.

And that brings me to the nesting part of this post.  I still can’t get used to Sydney as my home.  I don’t want to, the truth be told.  I don’t want to be a part of this place.  It’s like it bores into my soul, or strips something out of me every time I drive through the city.  Just being in Sydney often makes me feel like my life is at an end!  I feel hopeless here.  We’ve made some lovely friends, good people, whose company I enjoy; but at some level it feels a bit like we’re trying too hard.  It’s like Jerry Seinfeld says, you get to a point in your life where you have your friends, and you don’t need or want any more; you’ve only got a certain number of ‘slots’ to fill and those are all filled.  I guess I’m also unique in this sense because I don’t ‘need’ friends as such, or at least I don’t have to socialise to feel complete.  Socialising for me is an effort.  Don’t get me wrong, I usually enjoy it once I’m doing it, but sometimes I just want me time, alone time.  My husband is the opposite, and although he loves doing his own thing or just spending time with me, he really needs lots of people around him and lots of stuff happening constantly.  He’s an extrovert and I’m an introvert, in the simplest sense.

I’m really over complaining about Sydney; I don’t like it, end of story, and I will never feel at home here.  I want to move to Melbourne.  At least the city has no negative affiliations for me, I can start fresh there, and I do have some good friends there who I’d like to see more often.  More than anything, it’s about starting fresh and settling down properly, instead of this forced ‘plonking’ I’ve done in Sydney.  I’m only here because husband wanted to come here, and I figured it wasn’t fair of me to make him move to a city that he, at the time, hated; he’s coming to live on the other side of the world with me, so I should at least give him the choice of city.  Oh how I wish I hadn’t relented!

I’ll never forget that moment I chose my Sydney fate.  We’d had a few drinks, more than a few really, having come from an annual rugby club dinner at the Houses of Parliament (London), and we were partying the night away at the after party which was on one of those permanently moored boats along the Embankment – Tattersall Castle?  Or was it Queen Mary or whatever that other one is called…? I can’t remember.  It was somewhere close to midnight, and we happened to coordinate our air (read: cigarette) breaks up on the deck outside.  I wore a cheap, black cocktail dress I’d bought off eBay for 30 pounds and I was hot and sweaty from dancing downstairs in the nightclub.

“Okay. Let’s go to Melbourne then.”  He looked at me with the most forlorn look on his face.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and asked him to repeat it, which he did.  My reaction wasn’t what he or I expected; it was delayed, and not because I was utterly overjoyed at the prospect of moving to a city I’d wanted to live in for a good ten years.  I couldn’t handle allowing him to make that sacrifice for me, to move to a city that, four years prior, he’d experienced as cold, unfriendly, and generally boring, when he knew Sydney a little, and had found it so friendly, warm, sunny, full of fun and beaches and pubs and his favourite rugby.  I finally hugged him and said “thank you”.  But I couldn’t feel happy; I felt deflated, like it was a bit of an anti-climax.  And he was clearly miserable.

We went back downstairs and I told a friend from Melbourne that the decision had been made; needless to say she was very happy, as was her Kiwi boyfriend who was going to be moving down around the same time as us and knew no one in the city.

I really wish I’d ignored my man’s misery and ploughed ahead with the plan of Melbourne; but how would we have booked a wedding venue when neither of us really knew the city?  How could we have moved there any way?  We’d have had to organise every aspect of our wedding in the four months between arriving in January and getting married in April, and that’s ignoring the fact we’d need to find a place to live and get jobs.  Could it have been done?  I can’t answer that, because we never attempted it.  Maybe there’s a parallel universe somewhere with a version of me living in Melbourne, buying a house there, decorating a room for this baby, planting vegies in the garden, working as a freelance editor for some awesome publishing house… Or maybe that other version of me is just as miserable as this one, knowing that Australia is the wrong place to be.  Coming home has made me question why we ever did it, why we left London.  I know it was because I wanted to bring my children up and settle down somewhere more family-friendly, slower-paced, with better weather and more social freedom.  But that idealistic picture I had of Australia is slowly becoming eroded, as I realise more and more just how behind we are here, and how maybe being here doesn’t suit me as I thought.  Maybe that realisation I had at 18 that I was actually Australian and not European is being turned on its head, and once again I struggle with my cultural and social identity.  Time will tell…

Pregnancy and nesting

So I’m now 27 weeks along and feeling just fine. It’s certainly been an interesting ride so far.  Baby’s head is sitting firmly in my pelvis (not a pleasant feeling on the bladder) and feet and hands are moving almost constantly. Which is good, it’s what’s meant to be happening apparently. Despite being overweight, I’m healthy, blood pressure is normal, baby’s heart rate is normal and I feel good.  Being pregnant hasn’t been hard yet, but I suspect as I venture into this third trimester I’ll start to feel a bit heavy.

I’m having the baby at home, not in a hospital, which has been my wish from before I even wanted to be pregnant (or had someone to get me pregnant!) and I’m really excited about it all. At first I was a bit apprehensive about giving birth in our loungeroom, as we live in a tiny one bedroom flat under a big mansion, so it’s not like I can dedicate a room as the birthing room, and baby won’t have his or her own room (not that it’s needed anyway early on). We’d talked about moving out to somewhere with two bedrooms before baby arrived, and I thought this was the plan until a couple of months ago my husband mentioned casually how he’d been telling people I was having the baby in our lounge in our current flat.  I was surprised to hear this!  Turns out he’d worked it all out in his own head but had forgotten to mention it to me.  He said he thought it made sense – we live in one of the best suburbs in Sydney, right up on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  It’s so beautiful that tourists come here from everywhere just to walk around across the road from our house, and it’s the perfect place – calm, natural, quiet, awe-inspiring – to bring a baby into the world and for him or her to spend the first few months of life.  He commented yesterday that the lounge is such a peaceful room, not too bright but not too dark, large enough to fit a big pool in, wooden floors to help deal with any, erm, spills, and just a generally serene place, perfect for the arrival of our first baby.  I soon realised that he was right and that we didn’t need to move.

And that brings me to the nesting part of this post.  I still can’t get used to Sydney as my home.  I don’t want to, the truth be told.  I don’t want to be a part of this place.  It’s like it bores into my soul, or strips something out of me every time I drive through the city.  Just being in Sydney often makes me feel like my life is at an end!  I feel hopeless here.  We’ve made some lovely friends, good people, whose company I enjoy; but at some level it feels a bit like we’re trying too hard.  It’s like Jerry Seinfeld says, you get to a point in your life where you have your friends, and you don’t need or want any more; you’ve only got a certain number of ‘slots’ to fill and those are all filled.  I guess I’m also unique in this sense because I don’t ‘need’ friends as such, or at least I don’t have to socialise to feel complete.  Socialising for me is an effort.  Don’t get me wrong, I usually enjoy it once I’m doing it, but sometimes I just want me time, alone time.  My husband is the opposite, and although he loves doing his own thing or just spending time with me, he really needs lots of people around him and lots of stuff happening constantly.  He’s an extrovert and I’m an introvert, in the simplest sense.

I’m really over complaining about Sydney; I don’t like it, end of story, and I will never feel at home here.  I want to move to Melbourne.  At least the city has no negative affiliations for me, I can start fresh there, and I do have some good friends there who I’d like to see more often.  More than anything, it’s about starting fresh and settling down properly, instead of this forced ‘plonking’ I’ve done in Sydney.  I’m only here because husband wanted to come here, and I figured it wasn’t fair of me to make him move to a city that he, at the time, hated; he’s coming to live on the other side of the world with me, so I should at least give him the choice of city.  Oh how I wish I hadn’t relented!

I’ll never forget that moment I chose my Sydney fate.  We’d had a few drinks, more than a few really, having come from an annual rugby club dinner at the Houses of Parliament (London), and we were partying the night away at the after party which was on one of those permanently moored boats along the Embankment – Tattersall Castle?  Or was it Queen Mary or whatever that other one is called…? I can’t remember.  It was somewhere close to midnight, and we happened to coordinate our air (read: cigarette) breaks up on the deck outside.  I wore a cheap, black cocktail dress I’d bought off eBay for 30 pounds and I was hot and sweaty from dancing downstairs in the nightclub.

“Okay. Let’s go to Melbourne then.”  He looked at me with the most forlorn look on his face.  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and asked him to repeat it, which he did.  My reaction wasn’t what he or I expected; it was delayed, and not because I was utterly overjoyed at the prospect of moving to a city I’d wanted to live in for a good ten years.  I couldn’t handle allowing him to make that sacrifice for me, to move to a city that, four years prior, he’d experienced as cold, unfriendly, and generally boring, when he knew Sydney a little, and had found it so friendly, warm, sunny, full of fun and beaches and pubs and his favourite rugby.  I finally hugged him and said “thank you”.  But I couldn’t feel happy; I felt deflated, like it was a bit of an anti-climax.  And he was clearly miserable.

We went back downstairs and I told a friend from Melbourne that the decision had been made; needless to say she was very happy, as was her Kiwi boyfriend who was going to be moving down around the same time as us and knew no one in the city.

I really wish I’d ignored my man’s misery and ploughed ahead with the plan of Melbourne; but how would we have booked a wedding venue when neither of us really knew the city?  How could we have moved there any way?  We’d have had to organise every aspect of our wedding in the four months between arriving in January and getting married in April, and that’s ignoring the fact we’d need to find a place to live and get jobs.  Could it have been done?  I can’t answer that, because we never attempted it.  Maybe there’s a parallel universe somewhere with a version of me living in Melbourne, buying a house there, decorating a room for this baby, planting vegies in the garden, working as a freelance editor for some awesome publishing house… Or maybe that other version of me is just as miserable as this one, knowing that Australia is the wrong place to be.  Coming home has made me question why we ever did it, why we left London.  I know it was because I wanted to bring my children up and settle down somewhere more family-friendly, slower-paced, with better weather and more social freedom.  But that idealistic picture I had of Australia is slowly becoming eroded, as I realise more and more just how behind we are here, and how maybe being here doesn’t suit me as I thought.  Maybe that realisation I had at 18 that I was actually Australian and not European is being turned on its head, and once again I struggle with my cultural and social identity.  Time will tell…

Chase family – NOT American

So, I’ve been doing my genealogical research seriously for about a decade now.  I have had periods where I’ve done virtuallyl nothing for ages, so that’s why I’m only up to about 250 people in my tree (I haven’t included living relatives like my parents’ siblings, due  to privacy, but also because that doesn’t really help me get further back… so I’m missing about another 14 people there…)

The Chase branch in my family is pretty interesting, well I think so. But the annoying barrier I’ve run up against time and time again, well perhaps not so much as a barrier but a frustration, is that Chase is always assumed to be an American surname. So when I search on various genealogical forums and whatnot, people ALWAYS ask me if I’m related to some Chase individual from Massachusetts or something!  I’ve gotten back to about 1790 or so on that branch, and so far they’re all east end Londoners, with the family moving slowly further east, so beginning in Shoreditch and Hackney (central east London, zone 1 on the Tube map now), and eventually ending up in Essex (off the tube network). 

Because there are so many Americans doing family history, and the Chase family must have literally exploded when Thomas and Aquila Chase went out there sometime in the 1600s or something, it’s near impossible to rein in the research and concentrate purely on UK Chases.  It’s quite possible that I’m related to these Chases who went out on the Mayflower or something like that, but I know that the branch of the Chase family that I come from is totally British.

It was fun, the other week, when Google Street View came out and I was able to have a look at the church where my 4x great grandparents were married in 1828 – St Leonard’s Shoreditch, in case you’re wondering.  Although really, looking at it on Google is pretty silly when I live in London and could go and have a look at it any time.  It’s quite an important church for the Chases, as there were numerous children baptised there too.

Now’s the time to spend a day (probably turn into weeks) at the London Metropolitan Archives and get a hold of these parish records, get some parent details for Daniel Chase and Charlotte Robertson (my 4x great grandparents) and find out once and for all, a) if Charlotte was Scottish (just a hunch I have), and b) if yet another generation of Chases comes from central east London.  I always see all these Chases from places down south like Portsmouth, but the ones from London are few and far between. Are we special? I think so!

My dad always mentions the information we got when we ordered the Chase heraldic crest. The print out we were given says that the first mention of Chase was, I think, in the Domesday Book, or some such early Norman record dating back to the 1300s at least. Ironically, he was the Earl of Essex I believe! The name is Norman in origin, from the French for ‘hunter’, chasseur. 

But before I do any of that I must get my partner’s family tree sorted out to a point so his 94 year old granddad can check it out before he goes off to meet all the ancestors in person!

Rattlesnake vomits

I moved into a place which I (or someone along the way) dubbed ‘Castle Aspenlea’. There were five of us there, with various other hangers-on, dossers, dodgies, friends, losers, freaks, units from all over the place lobbing in from time to time. A fairly typical antipodean sharehouse, the Castle was the temporal junction point (of the entire space-time continuum – just wanted to use that line!)… no it was a London sharehouse dream – we should have had a camera installed, would have made an awesome reality tv show.

One Saturday morning I got up about 11am to find Rattlesnake still drunk from the night before. He clearly hadn’t been to bed yet, and wasn’t planning on it for a while, as he sat muttering and drinking a Fosters on the couch. A tall, lanky, messy haired, Aussie, Rattle was the quintessential occa bloke. His drunken, drug-fuelled ramblings were some of the most priceless speeches ever uttered in the history of antipodean dodginess in London.  I hung out with him in our converted kitchen/lounge while I had a cup of coffee – perfect comedy entertainment to start the weekend, and I was feeling fairly good myself, not having gone out the night before.  It was a fairly normal occurrence, for Rattle to still be up after a big night, but by this point he was usually on the downward turn to crashing out for a few hours before doing it all again on the Saturday night. Today he was clearly going for a record.

I popped out to Sainsbury’s for some breakfast items, probably for about 20 minutes at most, and when I came back through our front door, there was a nasty surprise just in front of the doorstep.  On the tiled area leading to the street pavement was a significantly large pile of regurgitated beer.  I side-stepped the revolting deposit and yelled out, ‘Rattle, did you throw up out the front?’ as I came through the front door. The man was adamant that it had nothing to do with him, when it was clear it was his. He claimed initially that he’d never vomit, it wasn’t his style, that he was a hard arse, a ‘unit’. I hadn’t heard that term until I moved to London – coming from Canberra I don’t think I was a very ‘typical’ Aussie, and a lot of these types of expressions were foreign to me.

Anyway, so finally, Rattle said, ‘well there’s nothing wrong with throwing up, everyone’s done it. You wouldn’t admit it but you’ve done it.’  I laughed because I’m famous for being sick from drinking too much. But he wouldn’t let it go, obviously feeling a bit stupid for being sick.  Eventually, Siggy, our token South African flatmate, came downstairs and I told her about the vomit. ‘Rattle!’ she shouted, half laughing, half revolted.  Then her boyfriend Jim came down and saw the vomit too; he promptly retreated back upstairs in disgust.

By this point, Rattle started to feel a bit guilty – ‘you can’t just leave it there, someone will step in it, it’s grose!’ I said.  So as I cooked my breakfast, he sat quietly sipping his beer on the couch, then stumbled out the back for a cigarette. ‘I feel bad,’ he said, when he came back inside. He did his ‘hovering’ act, when he’d elect to lean precariously against the kitchen bench, can in hand, and I’d almost hold my breath looking at him, thinking he could drop the can or keel over at any moment.  Dear Rattle, I thought, he has a good heart, despite his drunken rampages and being a general menace to society more often than not. ‘Just get the bucket and wash it away with water,’ I suggested.

So next thing I knew, he was stumbling up hall with our handle-less bucket, full of water.  I couldn’t miss this moment of comedy gold, but I didn’t want to distract him from cleaning up – the only time we ever saw Rattle clean was when he couldn’t get to sleep on a Sunday after 12 hours of coke the night before! I crept after him down the hallway and ducked into my room, which was right at the front of the house, used to be the lounge. I didn’t dare lift the wooden blind on the bay window, so I stood and listened to the water sloshing across the tiles, washing the offending material into the gutter. Suddenly, I heard Rattle’s voice over the trickle of water. ‘Hey ladies. Just doing some cleaning. Someone vomited in front of my house.’ I laughed out loud as I heard the poor innocent girls walking past giggle and groan in disgust. ‘Ewww!’ Rattle, true gentleman that he is, gave us yet another priceless moment. ‘So,’ he said to the girls, ‘you ladies fancy coming in for a drink?’ I burst out laughing and ran back to the lounge to relay the turn of events to Siggy.

‘All sorted,’ said Rattle, wandering back into the lounge.  He gave us his signature smirk-cross-intoxicating smile, realising I’d told Siggy about his pickup attempt whilst simultaneously cleaning up his own vomit. ‘Yeah,’ he said, taking another sip of beer and sending the empty bucket flying across the kitchen floor – almost outside. ‘They were keen, you know.’ We fell about laughing, it was pure gold!